Is there anyone that can give any clues regarding the CHARACTERISTICS fields that appear in the unit specifications when saving a game XML in the editor? From what I have seen, it can contain up to 8 hexadecimal numbers (0-9,A-F), for instance I have seen "A0010001", but I have not been able to figure out what this stands for. My guess is that it specifies a number of 0/1 values, each one telling if the unit has a certain property or not (8 hex values make 0/1 values for up to 32 unit properties). Any hints or wild guesses would be welome!

My take on the different strength values mentioned under the heading 'Unit characteristics' in the manual is that they are calculated directly from the equipment data, for instance (attack strength) = (number of rifle squads) * (attack value of rifle squad) + ... (for all equipment types) , or something like that. The CHARACTERISTICS that appear in the XML file might have to do with it, but how it fits in is unclear to me. What's more, there is some randomness in it as well: each time you load a sce file in the editor and save the XML, the CHARACTERISTICS entries can take on different values. One hint is that it ends on "1" for veteran units, while untried units always seem to have "0" at the end.

My take on the different strength values mentioned under the heading 'Unit characteristics' in the manual is that they are calculated directly from the equipment data, for instance (attack strength) = (number of rifle squads) * (attack value of rifle squad) + ... (for all equipment types) , or something like that. The CHARACTERISTICS that appear in the XML file might have to do with it, but how it fits in is unclear to me. What's more, there is some randomness in it as well: each time you load a sce file in the editor and save the XML, the CHARACTERISTICS entries can take on different values. One hint is that it ends on "1" for veteran units, while untried units always seem to have "0" at the end.

Are you sure you took the time to read everything under that heading? It's not all about combat. It's also about abilities. Also a unit being either untried or veteran is also a characteristic of the unit.

Just make a small scenario and give a test unit different characteristics one at a time and then make an xml dump to see what has changed. Simple enough. I've never been too concerned about xml files to bother with them for the most part.

I have played around with a test-"scenario" (just one unit per force - nothing else). One clue about CHARACTERISTICS: For untried units, it is recalculaed every time a scenario is loaded. For verteran units, it remains fixed (at least for the few tests I did). So one hint is that (at least part of) CHARACTERISTICS is used for storing the randomness pertaining to untried units. Well, that's all I got so far.